My love/hate relationship with my iPhone

It's been said by some that I'm the only person they know that complains about the iPhone so I thought it was probably time for my definitive list of gripes having had it a year now.

Battery Life:
My biggest complaint, my battery life is truely terrible. I'm charging on average twice a day, a full charge before I leave for work and then, depending on usage, another one by late afternoon or in the evening to make it through the night (mainly to stop me having to charge it from flat in the morning or turning it off)

I identified my poor battery performance fairly early on and took the issue up with O2, who referred me to the Genius Bar in the local Apple Store. The Apple staff member simply instructed me to turn off push email on 3G when not using them (I originally got the iPhone to eleminate the push email data charges of my old phone so I'm always using push email and therefore 3G!)

Camera:
Theres no denying the quality of the camera in the iPhone is awful. Low megapixel count, no flash, no zoom and no video, all things that were pretty standard on phone before the original iPhone came out (never mind the 3G).

I do find it odd that Apple haven't added video or zoom in any firmware updates especially in light that the 3Gs gets them, a paid for zoom app appears to be available in the app store but I'm pretty sure you need to Jailbreak to get video.

Windows XP64 bit support:
I realise I'm one of the few people probably running XP64 but given that iTunes for 64bit Vista runs fine on XP64 (once you modify the install file to not check OS versions) I don't understand why it can't just support XP64. Prior to getting the iPhone I was running an older version of iTunes under XP64 that didn't have the OS check on install but the iPhone required a newer version of iTunes to work with.

Unfortunately, while iTunes works fine for sync'ing with the iPhone the driver support doesnt allow me to do firmware upgrades, restores or access any of the photos on the phone. Fortunately I have an XP32 laptop I can do all this on.

Interestingly the iPhone box doesn't come with any 'minimum system requirments'!

Picture Messaging:
This was eventually addressed in a firmware update but the lack of integrated Picture Messaging from the outset was a significant oversight on Apple's part. Incoming picture messages arrived as a normal text message with a link to a web page where you could view the picture message (data connection notwithstanding) but the only way to send outgoing picture messages was initially only through Jailbreaking the iPhone and installing a non-approved application or later by installing an approved application that wasn't able to use your tarrif and sent picture messages had to be paid for via PayPal.

Sat Nav:
Ok I realise that Google Maps isn't really Sat Nav but it was pretty obvious it was going to be used as one until something like TomTom came out (price notwithstanding). It really needs to have a caching options (such as caching the route of directions it's providing) because the minute you lose data connectivity you end up looking at a blank screen with a line and a dot showing your location (and you won't even know how zoomed in you are) and it needs to override the screen lockout setting. Asking it to speak the directions so you don't have to keep looking at the screen [while driving] is probably expecting too much.

Interestingly the new iPhone 3Gs has turn-by-turn in Google Maps but I don't know if any other issues are addressed. Alternatively you can Jailbreak and use xGPS.

Photo crash/reboot:
I wasn't the only one to report this but I suspect I'm in a minority of people who encountered this problem. I got sent about 3 high resolution photos via email which I attempted to save to the phone with the 'save all' function. It turned out that only the first image actually saved (saving each individually worked ok) however when you attempted to view these photos on the phone it would reboot the phone. Removing the photos from the phone proved difficult (in light of not being able to access the photos under XP64 as mentioned above) but in the end I was able to invoke the delete function before the photo had finished rendering and caused the reboot.

This was confirmed by Apple to be a known issue however, as their firmware update notes are as detailed as 'bug fixes' I have no idea if this has been fixed yet.

Notes sync:
Again this was addressed in a recent firmware update but initially the iPhone didn't sync notes when connected to an Exchange server for push email.

The Dock connector:
With the iPod Apple introduced us to the Dock connector. It would appear that even Apple cannot maintain a 'standard' either because accessories that worked with devices that previously sported the dock connector (such as the car charger for my iPod and even reportedly accessories made for the original 2G iPhone) are reported as not supported by the 3G iPhone forcing you to buy new accessories!